January 08, 2013

How do you implement great training at an enterprise-level company?

Good SEO training can move mountains. Great SEO training can put you in the "Honeymoon Phase" of the In-house SEO Life Cycle (in a nutshell, this means it’s when everyone is drooling over SEO and you can accomplish things you would not ordinarily achieve).

Jessica Bowman caught up with Markus Renstrom, Head of SEO at Yahoo, to talk about his thoughts on training, what
they do at Yahoo, and to glean more of his juicy tidbits for the in-house SEO
community. Take it away Markus:

Taking Markus’ comments to the next level:

Get
really smart at training, is Makus’ advice. Tailor the material based on what
your audience does. Make it crystal
clear (so that even your granny can understand) exactly what they need to do
when they go back to their desk. Don’t
forget to follow-up. Too often trainings are conducted, new tasks/processes are
assigned, but accountabilities, check-ins, and adjustments are not made. The
end result is nothing happens.

Get
really great at executing SEO training is SEOinhouse.com’s advice. This is
crucial, but not everyone has the “aptitude” to execute great training. Few
subject matter experts are good at communicating their technical expertise in a
way that others can understand and get excited about. You need to have passion about SEO, and the
ability to drop the jargon and talk about SEO in everyday language so that
someone who knows nothing about SEO can grasp the concepts AND how they act on
them in their everyday activities.

Create
the process and supporting materials first. Then, create a standard and
implement it by training the company on the new standard. This is great in theory, but too often it
fails during execution because the materials are poorly thought through,
overwhelming and not understandable by non-SEOs. Ideally people/SEO teams with the “aptitude”
for creating brilliant resources would create resources for other departments. If
you do not have this skill, outsource it. When SEO generates millions in revenue a year,
this is money well spent.